waftcamfandomcom-20200215-history
Records: Automaton Wide-Release
'Joyful Labor' Some six months after the London Conference on automatons, the first of the truly-refined efforts were reaching commercial markets in London and Bordeaux (and soon after, around the CMC and into the frontiers). There were several manufactories, mostly in some mix of OM and RANP brain trust behind the automatons themselves. There was very little standardization at this point save for some of the chassis hardware, but there were four initial model classes. It was basic categorization but covered the gamut of the greatest needs: *household *agriculture *general labor *sentry Powered by arcane crystals, half the cost of this new labor was in the power source. Unlike the old ways, where the power source was same food everybody else ate... The less expensive initial option (by a long shot) was to simply use a regular supply of industrial-strength crystals. The more expensive option was to get channeling ("permanent") crystals, though that would eventually pay off down the road. In former slave-use economies, at this point more at the edges of the CMC, the automatons were a savior. 'Market Analysis' Aquitaine's RANP-OM experience had been working with partners to refine the AI and physical capacity of synthetic labor. After the plague, the whole world was still depopulated, and with certain genocidal tactics to depopulate it further, even premium labor didn't come close to filling demand. The synthetic labor was a Godsend-Promise, but they'd needed to work the bugs out before a wide release: namely, how to make it as human as possible without making it too human. The more sophisticated the interface and processing, the more it could understand and do. And the bigger risk of other human-like behavior as well. In this case, the automatons that came to market had designed consciousness: finding fulfillment in carrying out the tasks it was designed for: essentially, fulfilling it purpose in life. It had a destiny – and that alone was engineered as "destiny" was an automatic function or consideration, especially of the AI that had been built from the ground-up. 'Long-Term Concerns' There were a dozen issues flagged for tracking, from how learning would affect programming and prioritization, to potential for programming corruption, to how it would handle conflicting orders. Lab and limited testing did what they could, but it could only be "so perfect" before the needs of having something outweighed the risks and liabilites of having nothing. The post-plague world had a great deal of nothing. Even the "perfect" automaton was imperfect. What did it look like if it did its job "too well"? Would humanity grow soft and decadent and rot away? Would agricultural automatons grow to be the only labor for food – only to fail in some catastrophy and send humanity into starvation? Having a machine that was "too perfect" was its own liability, but that was a lesser and more long-term problem than the pure evil it replaced: slavery. It was a complex issue and it would tracked and talked about for as long as it existed. Category:Hall of Records Category:1382